Interior Designer Charles Faudree: French Flair

Looking back on the wonderful career of interior designer Charles Faudree

Slide 1 Of Interior Designer Charles Faudree:French Flair

Interior designer Charles Faudree, long a favorite of Traditional Home readers, was known for his fondness for all things French. He was based in Tulsa, where he had an interior design studio and shop. The multitasking and highly versatile designer—who enjoyed an international following—wrote popular books on design, led design tours of his beloved French countryside, and designed wallpaper and fabric. He designed both quaint cottages and lavish formal homes. “I’m a big believer in the mix,” he said. “A single object on a tabletop or a single work of art on the wall can be nice, but for me, mixing collections provides the most excitement.”

Faudree's work first appeared in our magazine in its second year of existence (February 1990), when we featured a Tulsa home he designed. Even then, he wielded a highly decorative style lush with objects and patterns for an "elegantly eclectic environment that is at once French and English, formal and casual, feminine and masculine." Over the next two decades, we featured 10 more houses he had designed, seven of them being his own homes. (The antique saltbox was short-lived for Faudree, a rolling stone who declares, “I feel about my houses the same way Elizabeth Taylor felt about her husbands. Each one is my best and my last!")

Three times his own homes made our covers: in April 1991, and on our 2000 and 2002 holiday issues. We watched as his enthusiasm for English florals waned and his French style bloomed in full. In May 1995, he was a Traditional Home Design Award winner. Like the magazine he grew up with, he was one traditionalist who was always evolving.

Here Faudree is shown with his beloved Cavalier King Charles Spaniels.

Here Faudree shows his informal side. Color and pattern suffuse this cottage’s entryway, making for a warm welcome. Collections are an integral element of every Faudree home; note the walking sticks by the door.

Here an antique bergére and wing chair pair up in a soft and sophisticated living room. Despite the formality of a dazzling crystal chandelier, the living room furniture is scaled and cushioned for comfort.

Gilt mirrors flank this living room’s fireplace, while two linen-covered French bergéres are pulled close for warmth. Plaids and florals live stylishly together. The living room has French country flair, which is perfect for the Francophile homeowners.

When decorating the living room of his Oklahoma cabin, Faudree began with a favorite fabric—a vintage floral—found at a flea market in France. The room beautifully blends fine fabrics and furniture with knotty pine paneling and an exposed-beam ceiling.

Even when living in an interim house while building his dream home in Tulsa, Faudree found time to decorate lavishly for Christmas. “A friend encouraged me to haul out my ornaments, and the result was one of the nicest Christmas seasons I’ve ever had,” Faudree said. The seven-foot blue spruce is trimmed with gold French ribbon, gold braid and tassels, freeze-dried hydrangea blossoms, pink roses, and pinecones frosted with gold.

Faudree used a peanut color to warm up the family room in this Bartlesville, Oklahoma, house. He decorated the room around a floral sofa from the homeowner’s previous home. “Fortunately, red is the homeowner’s favorite color, and it’s also mine,” Faudree said. “To give the family room energy, we pulled the red from the sofas and made it pop on the two big club chairs.” See the exterior of the home in the next image.

In this happy sunroom, the designer’s love of dogs is abundantly evident in the needlepointed spaniel pillows and porcelain bulldog. What looks like a tile floor is actually concrete, scored and stained a rich terra-cotta.

In the dining room of this Tulsa home, the original plasterwork sets an elegant tone. Painted panels above the doors add French country charm that is enhanced by the bespoke gilded cornices on the window treatments.

Presided over by an imposing buffet, the dining room has an antique French farm table and candlelit chandelier. One of Charles’ first acquisitions—an antique tole footbath—has a place of honor beneath the French Empire convex mirror.

This kitchen is from one of Faudree’s own homes. It gets its French farmhouse ambience from a collection of chickens, some of which nest in the antique “thing” hanging over the island. (Charles doesn’t know what the thing is; he just knows he likes it.)

Before a trip to England, the owner of this home asked Faudree what she should buy for the house. “I told her blue plates and that was what she came back with,” the designer said. Her collection now adorns the walls of the guest bedroom.

The fringe on the lampshade and the monogramming on the chest of drawers are among this bedroom’s pretty details. Faudree says, "The mix in the girl's bedroom shown here is more about pattern than collectibles. Pink toile on the little chair and bed curtains mixes with stripes on the wall, a hand-painted floral design on the commode, and florals on the lamp and lampshade. Start with a pivotal fabric, then mix other patterns of different scales from the same color family."

In Faudree’s latest book, Details, written with Francesanne Tucker and with photography by Jenifer Jordan[148], he shares his latest inspirations. The book is published by Gibbs-Smith. To order the book, click here[149].